Last post: Denmark calls time on ‘vintage’ letter service
In a sign of the times, Denmark appears to be the first country where the official postal carrier will stop delivering letters.
By Amelia Nierenberg and Maya Tekeli
December 31, 2025 — 3.03pm
Copenhagen: Andreas Birch’s very first job as a young boy was sticking postage stamps on envelopes. Week after week, he helped his father, the veterinarian in a rural village in central Denmark, mail bills to clients.
The post office where his father used to drop off bags full of letters is now a kindergarten. And like many Danes, Birch, now 31, hasn’t licked a stamp in years.
Two Danish red letterboxes stand in front of The Marble Church in Copenhagen, Denmark, on December 16.Credit: NurPhoto via AFP
“I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I sent a letter,” he said.
Denmark has had a postal service for more than 400 years. But a steep decline in its use has led the Nordic country’s long-time postal carrier to stop letter deliveries entirely, a change that took effect on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT).
Danes have seen it coming for months: the carrier, PostNord, has been removing its red mailboxes, once a ubiquitous public fixture.
The disappearance of the mailboxes is “what actually made people emotional”, Julia Lahme, a trend researcher and the director of Lahme, a Danish communications agency, said, “even though most of them hadn’t sent a letter in 18 months”.
Denmark is one of the world’s most digitised countries. Less than 5 per cent of the population still receive their official communications in the mail.Credit: Getty Images
Letter writing in the country has declined more than 90 per cent since 2000, according to PostNord, which is owned jointly by the Danish and Swedish governments. Next year, in Denmark, it will only deliver packages, although in Sweden it will continue to deliver letters.
The change comes partly as a result of a drop-off in government mail. Denmark is one of the world’s most digitised countries. Only 250,000 people, or less than 5 per cent of the population, still receive their official communications in the mail.
“People simply do not rely on physical letters the way they used to,” PostNord Denmark communications director Andreas Brethvad said, adding that, because nine in 10 Danes shop online each month, the change “is about keeping up with times to meet the demands of society. It’s a natural evolution.”
